


How the Ghosts Stole Christmas

by elwenyere



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - X-Files Fusion, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-Typical Banter, Canon-Typical Spookiness, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, First Kiss, Idiots in Love, M/M, not quite getting together
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-23
Updated: 2020-12-23
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:01:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,396
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28270593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elwenyere/pseuds/elwenyere
Summary: When the higher-ups assigned Special Agent Steve Rogers to the X-Files, they were hoping the former Army Captain would rein in his new partner — because as God and Assistant Director Fury knew, Tony Stark had made enough trouble for his superiors on his own. They probably didn't expect that just two years into their partnership, Steve would be following Tony into a haunted house on Christmas Eve.
Relationships: Clint Barton/Natasha Romanov, Steve Rogers/Tony Stark
Comments: 20
Kudos: 45





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is basically a Stony reboot of the X-Files episode of the same name, so all credit for the story (and for a few lines of dialogue) goes to Chris Carter. A huge thanks also to MountainKestrel and Orange_Coyote for their invaluable help in cheering and beta - and to everyone on Discord and Tumblr for their generous encouragement. 
> 
> Finally, thank you to YOU for reading! This is my first attempt at an AU, so I would love to hear what you think. Thanks for sharing the world of this fic. 
> 
> CW: Descriptions of violence, including mentions of blood and blood loss; some characters are dead, but their deaths happened before the start of this story

The house that locals called the “Red Manor” rarely had visitors these days. Once a favorite stopping point for romantically inclined tourists and bored teenagers, the Manor now risked being swallowed up by the woods around it. Most of the east wing was covered in spindly legs of ivy, their tendrils stretching out toward the mossy shingles and cobwebbed balustrades that marked the slow creep of overgrowth across the remaining traces of human habitation. The windows of the house were dark – on this night as they had been every night since county officials condemned the property ten years earlier. Other than the odd rustling in the leaves, the only sounds that could be heard for miles around were the muffled notes of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” which drifted aimlessly from the car parked in the front drive.

If the contrast between the song and the scene struck the lone occupant of the car as ominous, his face didn’t show it. Not that anyone had ever accused Special Agent Tony Stark of having the stoic demeanor typical for a man in his line of work: indeed, most of the critical notes in his FBI records were variations on the theme of “stunning lack of professional decorum.” But at the moment Tony’s short bursts of energy were focused almost exclusively on a small flip phone and a bag of dried blueberries. Each glance down at the phone was followed by a quick shot of blueberries or a rapid beating of fingers across the bottom of the steering wheel – the cycle proceeding according to some internal rhythm incompatible with the tempo of holiday radio.

Tony’s latest round of tapping stilled suddenly as a pair of headlights loomed down the road. Fog scattered the approaching high beams into a thick gray haze, but Tony made no effort to peer through it in order to identify the man pulling up beside him. Special Agent Steve Rogers drove one of noisiest used cars at the Bureau, and he never returned Tony’s texts while he was on the road.

“I was starting to think I’d been stood up,” Tony greeted his partner as they rolled down their windows.

“You wouldn’t believe the check-out lines at Macy’s,” Steve said. “If I had to hear one more angel sweetly singing over the plains, I was going to start taking hostages.”

He narrowed his eyes at the decrepit house in front of them.

“What are we doing here anyway?”

“Stakeout,” Tony grinned.

“On Christmas Eve,” Steve pointed out.

“It’s an important date,” Tony observed.

“No kidding,” Steve said dryly.

“Important to the stakeout,” Tony continued. “Come on over here, Agent Smartass, and I’ll tell you all about it.”

Steve obliged, turning off the engine to his own car and sliding in through the passenger door of Tony’s. He must still have been carrying some tension from defusing the crock-pot riot that had threatened to break out in the Macy’s cookware section, because the muscles in his shoulders began to unknot as he settled into the leather seat next to Tony.

“Shoot,” he told his partner, digging into the bag of dried fruit Tony was rattling in his direction.

“’Twas the night before Christmas,” Tony began, “forty-three years ago, and our erstwhile colleagues at the Bureau were filled with the spirit of the Cold War season. That made for a decidedly un-jolly holiday for the owners of this house, one of whom had just been IDed as a Soviet spy – code name the Black Widow – and was about to be arrested on suspicion of treason. So on a cold winter’s night, they made a lover’s pact: that no hands but their own would ever tear them apart.”

“Poetically put,” Steve remarked.

“I live to please,” Tony replied. “The locals must have found the story suggestive too, because just over a decade after the neighbors they’d known as Charles and Natalie Rushman died, everyone in town was willing to swear – cross their true-blue American hearts and hope to meet Joe McCarthy in the afterlife – that the reason the next three owners of the house had fled the state was that every Christmas Eve, the former residents returned to recruit a pair of unsuspecting lovers and stage an encore performance.”

A silence stretched through the car as Tony watched for his partner’s reaction.

“Tony,” Steve sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose, “please tell me you did not call me out here on the night before Christmas to go ghostbusting.”

It was just this sort of behavior that had landed Tony in trouble with the FBI in the first place. Initially, Assistant Director Fury had been thrilled when MIT-prodigy Tony Stark abandoned his third graduate degree to join the Bureau at age twenty-five. Howard Stark, Tony’s father and the longtime head of the Science and Technology branch, had just been found dead in his locked bedroom with a bullet in his skull, and Fury hoped that the younger Stark might be interested in picking up where his father left off. Four case reports, six angry phone calls, and one out-of-court settlement later, Fury had learned the hard way that Tony was not interested in finishing his father’s work on unidentified objects and unexplained phenomenon but in exposing it. _If my father committed suicide_ , he had announced during a disciplinary hearing that Fury tried very hard to forget, _I will blow myself in the lobby of this building, and you can sell the tickets._

“You’re breaking my heart, Rogers,” Tony said with a grin. “I thought you were starting to love our hot dates with the paranormal.”

And though no cross-examination the higher-ups could devise would ever drag the admission from him, Steve _was_ getting attached to Tony’s work. That development was as surprising to Steve as it was to the top executives at the Bureau, who had had very different intentions when they’d assigned him as Tony’s partner two years ago. Exhausted by Special Agent Stark’s monomaniacal pursuit of the so-called “X-Files,” the top brass had looked at Steve’s record – a working-class kid from Brooklyn, recruited by the Army out of community college, promoted through the ranks, awarded a Purple Heart and a Distinguished Service Cross before his honorable discharge – and taken him for a company man: the kind of agent who would deliver orderly reports about his partner’s misconduct to a concerned superior officer. But thanks to Colonel Phillips’s selective record keeping, Steve’s new bosses didn’t know that he had earned most of his military honors on a rescue operation he’d been explicitly ordered not to attempt. If the Bureau chiefs had seen the smirk on Captain Rogers’ face when he returned to base with ten POWs and a hot-wired jeep in tow, they might have thought twice about pairing him up with Tony Stark.

Of course, even with (or perhaps because) of their shared predilection for insubordination, the partnership hadn’t always been a smooth fit. Tony’s attention to detail ran hot and cold with an unpredictability that had driven Steve to try everything from herbal teas to his neighbor Sharon’s yoga class: better to hunch his way through sleeping pigeon than to keep grinding his teeth every time he walked into their office and saw a paper-clip replica of the Washington Monument where Tony’s latest case report was supposed to be. And Tony had had to develop a whole new set of distinct eye rolls – ranging in significance from “I knew you’d say that, you corny bastard” to “stop being such a goddamn martyr” – to circumvent Steve’s tendency to dig in deeper the more resistance he faced.

But something had changed in their fourth month working together, after they’d gotten trapped in an Arctic research station with nothing but a possibly alien parasite, the team of scientists it was slowly driving mad, and their shared determination not to let anyone lock Steve in the freezer. Since then, Tony had shown Steve the files he was keeping on his father’s most classified work, “Project Rebirth.” And Steve had told Tony something he’d only admitted to one other living soul: that he, like the nameless subjects in Howard Stark’s notes, was missing time. Seventy-two hours sat like a blank in his memory, a yawning chasm between the day when he was hospitalized for severe pneumonia at nineteen and the day he emerged with an immune system that seemed coated in Teflon.

The result was that Steve had been finding it increasingly hard to say “no” to Tony’s pitches about the paranormal, even when they involved ex-soldiers who appeared to be spontaneously exploding in public places or a creature called the Fiji Mermaid. Steve found it especially hard to say “no” at close range. There was something about the way the corner of Tony’s mouth tugged upward when he came across a case that he knew Steve would find particularly irritating. Or perhaps it was the way that, even in the gloom of a starless night, Tony’s eyes always seemed to reflect some extra source of light Steve couldn’t otherwise detect.

“I have wrapping to do,” Steve pointed out, setting his jaw against the sight of just such a twinkle in Tony’s eye. “Sam’s hosting a dinner tomorrow for our group at the V.A., and Sharon invited the whole floor for drinks and white elephant.”

“Who’s Sharon?” Tony asked.

“She works on the floor above us, Tony,” Steve responded. “You’ve met her at least three times. You came over to her apartment last month when I was cat sitting.”

“Sounds like something a quitter would make up,” Tony said.

“I’ll be sure to give her your season’s greetings,” Steve acknowledged. “Look, if it were any other night, I might let you talk me into this. But I’ve only got eight hours to get home and get to sleep before I have to start roasting sweet potatoes for Sam’s.”

“All right, Rogers,” Tony nodded after a moment. “Go get your beauty rest.”

Steve allowed himself a quick clasp of Tony’s arm before he slipped back out of the car. It was for the best, he told himself. Tony hadn’t been sleeping very well, and God knew the man needed a holiday. But when Steve closed the passenger door behind him, he heard an echoing slam from the driver’s side and turned to see Tony walking toward the house.

“Tony, where are you going?” Steve called after him.

“Ghostbusting,” Tony called over his shoulder with a wink.

For a moment, Steve hesitated as he stared after the retreating form of his partner, the outline of Tony’s movements barely separated from the shadowy house by the searching beam of a flashlight. Then he pivoted firmly back toward his car with a shake of his head.

“I don’t have to follow him every time,” Steve muttered out loud. “It’s my New Year’s resolution.”

He reached into the pocket of his jacket in search of his keys but found only the boxed edges of an old baseball ticket. A quick pat-down of his other pockets yielded no better results, and Steve cursed slightly under his breath as he peered through the windows of Tony’s car and then his own to see if the keys had fallen out onto his seat. No luck.

“Perfect,” Steve muttered. And with a deep sigh, he turned toward the house and strode resignedly up the front walk.

Perhaps it was because he was trying to fortify himself against the pull of Tony’s stories, but as Steve drew closer to the porch, he had the strange impression that he could see more activity around the building than he had previously noticed. There were the intermittent strobes of light from the front door as Tony searched the foyer. But Steve also caught glimpses of movement out of the corner of his eye – as if something were crawling through the eaves. 

“Tony,” he called out as he walked through the front door. It was an unnecessary greeting: Tony was examining the portraits on the wall not ten feet away and had clearly seen Steve approaching. But Steve found himself wanting to confirm their proximity out loud.

“Couldn’t stay away, of course,” Tony smirked at him. “When did I hook you? Was it the Joe McCarthy line?”

“Did you take my car keys?” Steve asked.

“Why would I take your keys?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you grabbed them by mistake. Maybe you are psychologically incapable of not making everything into a –”

Steve was interrupted by an eruption of chimes from the grandfather clock next to him. He looked over to see the hour hand tick toward the ornate number eleven, each hour punctuated with a hollow strike of the brass rods. Just as the clock reached its final toll, a cold wind blew through the entryway, whipping at the hem of Steve’s trench coat and slamming the front doors shut with a slam.

“Well, that’s not ominous at all,” Tony remarked as Steve trotted forward to yank at the doorknobs. They were stuck in place – refusing even to rattle in response to Steve’s pulls.

“Will you stop trying to scare me and help me get the doors open?”

“A big hulking guy like you can’t budge them?” Tony asked, one eyebrow raised. “What do you expect me to do? I’m going to check out the second floor.”

True to his word, he turned away from Steve and started making his way up the stairs, the plaintive _creak, creak, creak_ of the old floorboards echoing the clock strikes, so that both sounds seemed to resound through the house. Steve’s jaw clenched – in annoyance and something else he preferred not to name.

“Tony,” he called, “I really have to get home.”

But the final words were swallowed up by a crack of thunder, which seemed to chase the sudden flashes of lightning through the hallway. The edges of the sheet-draped furniture and dusty window frames blazed into view, sharp and flat against the white glare, before flickering back to darkness. Steve felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up and whirled around just in time to catch a halo of flaming red hair silhouetted against the sitting-room windows. His hand jerked instinctively toward his holster, but in another second the outline was gone.

Steve shook his head. It must have been an afterimage from the lightning, and not, as he had thought for one irrational moment, the figure of a woman pressing her hand to the crimson gape of her torn stomach.

“You know, there’s a really interesting X-File from a few years back about some unknown entity that was breaking into elite research facilities by making itself intangible,” Tony called down the stairs. “Witnesses called it a ghost, but for a poltergeist, it was unusually interested in sabotaging corporate technology.”

Steve let out a slow breath as the sound of his partner’s voice settled around him, his feet feeling steadier as he turned them toward Tony. After all, what other choice did Steve have but to see this through? Either he was letting his nerves get the better of him – in which case there was no harm in staying until Tony had satisfied his curiosity – or there really was something else going on here (maybe some local kids playing a prank) – in which case he had to stay to ensure that Tony had backup.

Decision made, Steve climbed the stairs to the second story, where Tony had been continuing his monologue.

“I had a real hunch that the case was connected to another unsolved mystery,” Tony was saying, “the disappearance of an IT researcher at a company called Omnisapient, but I was never able to find enough evidence to connect the dots.”

When Steve reached the top of the stairs, he could see Tony moving through the hallway, trying each doorknob he passed in a succession of fruitless rattles.

“Did you notice the clock downstairs is keeping perfect time?” Steve asked.

“Is it?”

“And did it ever occur to you that someone might be living here?”

“The house has been vacant for a decade.”

With a sound almost closer to a moan than a creak, one of the doors that Tony had just tried swung open behind them, sending a shaft of warm light cutting across the hallway.

“Well how do you explain this then?” Steve asked. “Because when we were in the car, there wasn’t a light on in the house.”

Steve drew his gun and stepped softly toward the cracked door. As he crossed into the room, he found himself on a walkway overlooking a library. The room showed some of the signs of the house’s disuse. Sheets had been thrown over the smaller tables and chairs, and cobwebs clung to the candelabras on the fireplace mantle. But dozens of lamps set in double sconces were fully illuminated, throwing a soft light onto the mahogany bookshelves that lined the walls. Each shelf held rows of books, bound in matching sets with gold-embossed titles. A ladder connected the walkway to the floor below, which was partially covered by a network of overlapping Persian carpets.

“It certainly doesn’t look vacant in here,” Steve mentioned to Tony as his partner walked through the door. “There’s still smoke coming from the fireplace.”

Steve replaced his gun in its holster so he could climb down the ladder. Once he made it to the bottom, he paused to grip the side rail, holding it steady as Tony followed him.

“So if the motives here are less ‘unfinished business’ and more ‘breaking and entering,’” Tony wondered, “the question is whether the string of Christmas Eve double homicides is the work of the same killers or if there are copycats involved.”

“Funny, I don’t think you mentioned a killing spree when we were in the car.”

“Didn’t I?” Tony mused. “How forgetful of me.”

Steve was just winding up for an eye roll when a muffled thumping noise issued from the floorboards to their right. Tony moved toward it, and Steve fell in behind him, one hand hovering near Tony’s arm as he scanned automatically for anything that looked like an explosive. But there was no detectable force causing the wood below them to heave upward. In fact, it looked for all the world like the something underneath was fighting to get out.

Tony grabbed a poker from its stand next to the fire and jammed the point into a crack between two slats, using the tool to pry back the floorboards in chunks. By the time he pulled off the fourth block of wood, there was no doubt what they were looking at. Tony stood up next to Steve so they could survey the two corpses: one tall, broad, and faintly blonde, and the other more compact, with waves of dark hair and the remains of a goatee. Their bodies had partially decayed, but their clothes were reasonably well preserved, aside from a layer of dust and two rings of crusted blood surrounding the places where each torso had been pierced by a bullet.

“Okay,” Tony observed, “so ‘unlawful entry’ has been upgraded to ‘gunshot wounds,’ with a side of ‘Tell-Tale Heart.’”

“You know what’s weird?” Steve asked. “The tall one is wearing my outfit.”

They glanced back and forth between the tan trench coats and maroon button-downs adorning both Steve and the body buried in the floor.

“Well, Rogers,” Tony said finally, “I’ve tried to break the news about your fashion sense gently…”

“You know what’s weirder?” Steve continued. “The other guy is wearing yours.”

“Huh,” Tony acknowledged. “Would you look at that? So that means – and I’m saying this totally casually, by the way – because there is definitely not a part of my soul that’s trying to crawl its way screaming out of my body at this observation – but that means these two corpses –”

“Are us,” Steve finished.

“Right. So we should probably –”

“Get the hell out of here? I think that’s what I’ve been saying.”

They turned back toward the ladder they had climbed down, but the spot where it had stood was now empty – leaving no clear route to the walkway above. After exchanging a look, they strode toward a door on the opposite side of the room instead, throwing it open and stepping into…

A well-lit library, with a second-story walkway, shelves of gold-embossed books, a network of Persian carpets, and chunks of old wood torn out of the floor. The two men paused in confusion. Tony made a noncommittal clicking noise with his tongue, and Steve stepped halfway back into the room they had just left, pivoting between the two sets of sheet-covered armchairs and cobwebbed candelabras.

“It’s the same room,” Steve remarked. “And don’t –” He held up a finger as Tony’s mouth opened automatically. “– call me Captain Obvious. Let’s check the next one.”

They made their way across the library a second time, and Tony opened the door on the other side to reveal a walkway, books, Persian carpets, and a hole in the floor.

“Interesting,” Tony muttered, training his flashlight over the third, identical sets of sconces. Steve might have chosen a different word to describe the situation, but just at that particular moment, he didn’t feel like reflecting too hard on what it would be.

“So if I go out this door –” Tony continued, walking over to the door on the other side of the room. “I should come in –”

Steve pointed to the door they had just come through and nodded. He watched Tony exit the room from the other side and then turned back toward the entrance expectantly. No Tony emerged. Frowning slightly, Steve padded across the room to check the other door. But just as he crossed the center of the library, another wind gusted through from some unidentifiable source, and both the doors – first the one in front of him and then the one behind – slammed shut.

“Tony!” Steve yelled, a spike of adrenaline making his chest tighten. He ran toward the place where his partner had disappeared, but he already knew what he was going to find. The door was locked and immovable.


	2. Chapter 2

“Steve!” Tony yelled, banging against the door that had blown shut behind him. “Steve! Can you hear me?”

He growled in frustration at the silence on the other end and then stepped back, taking a deep breath to center himself. Objectively, they had been in far more dangerous situations. Not three weeks previously, for example, Steve had been held hostage for several hours by an office worker who thought his boss was turning people into zombies. Tony had harangued the FBI SWAT team in charge of extraction to within an inch of their lives, but in the end, Steve had managed to keep the gunman calm long enough to avoid casualties. The former Captain Rogers was cool under pressure – not to mention a crack shot – and whatever was going on in this house, he was probably handling it more than capably.

“Yeah, no, fuck that,” Tony muttered, taking another step backward and shooting the handle off the locked door separating him from his partner. Triumphantly, he yanked the door open, only to find himself staring at a solid brick wall.

“What the hell,” he swore.

“I could say the same thing to you, pal,” a voice said behind him, and Tony whirled around, gun raised.

The man standing across the room from him was pale-haired and broad-chested, his muscular arms crossed across a vaguely old-fashioned purple shirt. A large bandage had been wound around part of his head, and a range of smaller wraps and plasters dotted his forearms and hands. He didn’t give the impression of a man who was particularly careful in his comings and goings, and yet Tony had heard no sound of his approach.

“Who are you?” Tony demanded.

“Who am _I_?” the man echoed, “Who are _you_? You’re in my house. You just shot my door!”

“Your door that has a brick wall behind it?”

The man leaned around Tony to look at the doorway.

“Okaaaaaaay,” he said slowly. “A brick wall. Sure: whatever you say.”

Tony narrowed his eyes, spun around to confirm the appearance of the brick wall, and then spun back to his host.

“You’re messing with our heads,” Tony replied, keeping his gun trained on the other man’s chest. “And I don’t know if this whole ‘House of Usher’ vibe you’ve got going on is a cover for something more sinister – or if someone’s been experimenting with some very dangerous technology – but you need to tell me what the _fuck_ you’ve done with my partner.”

“Or what?” the other man grinned. “You’ll shoot me? Wouldn’t be the first time. Wouldn’t even be the first time _in this room_. But hey, I feel like we’re getting off on the wrong foot here. Why don’t you pull up a chair?”

He gestured toward the wingback chairs in front of the fireplace, where the logs obligingly burst into flame, crackling and popping as if they had been ablaze for hours.

“I’m Clint, by the way,” the man offered, settling himself into one of the chairs and kicking his feet up on a side table.

“Clint,” Tony repeated, looking back and forth from the stranger to the suddenly roaring fire, “as in Clint Barton. As in the ex-military sniper who changed his name to Charles Rushman when he married Soviet spy Natasha Romanov, and whose real identity only became common knowledge after he and his lover killed each other in this house forty-three years ago.”

“Sure,” Clint replied magnanimously, “whatever helps you feel at ease. Just…sit down, will you? You’re making me nervous.”

Tony’s mind was whirring through the gear changes of about eighteen – wait, twenty-three – possible explanations for what he was seeing, and he could feel the puzzle pulling his attention mercifully away from the rattle of anxiety he’d started to feel when the door slammed behind him. He holstered his gun and slid into the chair opposite Clint (or, in eleven out of the now-twenty-eight hypothetical scenarios, Ghost Clint) and watched him over the top of his folded hands.

“So if you are a ghost,” Tony asked conversationally, “why are you sitting me down for a fireside chat? Does the haunting business have a new P.R. rep? Trying out a gentler approach to scaring the shit out of people?”

“Well when you say it like that, it sounds stupid,” Clint replied. “But haunting, possession, the alienating social relations caused by private property – whatever you want to call it – there’s no law against getting to know each other a bit first, right? It’s been a while since we had a ghost hunter pass through.”

“What makes you think I’m a ghost hunter?” Tony inquired.

“Let’s just say you fit the bill,” Clint answered, ticking off qualities on his fingers, “erratic behavior, reckless disregard for clear signs of danger, that kind of…manic glint in your eyes.”

“Seems like a bit of a pot, kettle, black situation given, you know –” Tony gestured toward Clint’s bandages. “Not to mention the whole ‘starting fires with your mind’ and ‘appearing noiselessly in locked rooms’ thing.”

“Objectively scary stuff,” Clint nodded. “And what does it say about you that you came all the way out here to see it – on Christmas Eve – alone?”

“I’m not alone,” Tony retorted. “I’m here with my partner.”

“Yeah, and how’d you get him to come into the house with you?” Clint asked knowingly. “You steal his keys?”

Tony chewed at the inside of his cheek.

“No comment.”

“Look, pal, I’ve seen it before,” Clint observed. “You’ve probably gotten pretty good at keeping up appearances – making it seem like you’re eccentric, passionate, too smart for everyone around you. But deep down, you don’t believe that’s true. You think you’re careless, obsessive, always clinging to people and then pushing them away so that you can pretend being alone is your choice. So that you won’t have to feel guilty when the next risk you take turns out to be the last one.”

Tony felt his lips form a tight smile.

“Wow. You’ve sure got me all figured out,” he said flatly. “Now as much as I appreciate the Shades of Freud act – and I’m sure the inevitable ‘Daddy Issues’ segment would have been delightful – I’m going to find my partner and get the fuck out of here.”

“Hey, you brought up Daddy – not me,” Clint smirked. “But before you go – or try to, anyway – can I give you some advice?”

He stood up and walked over to the open doorway, where minutes before there had been nothing but brick.

“If everything looks like a wall to you,” Clint continued, stepping through the threshold into the next room, “it might be because you’re carrying the wall with you.”

“Really great stuff,” Tony replied. “You get that off a fortune cookie?”

“You’re a real clever guy,” Clint allowed. “But I’d hate to be there when no one’s around to catch the jokes – am I right? Anyway, good luck with the walls!” And with a jovial wave, he turned and sauntered out the opposite end of the library.

Tony bit back another retort (he wasn’t going to give Discount Casper the _satisfaction_ ) and contemplated the apparently open doorway, which either had never been or was currently still bricked shut.

“Please be a door to Steve,” he muttered. “Please be a door to Steve.”

He pushed his fingers into the space between rooms and encountered only solid mortar.

“Damn.”

* * *

Steve stood in the middle of the library, staring at the remains of the doors he’d kicked down, arms crossed in contemplation. He hadn’t been able to raise Tony by shouting through either of the room’s exits, and he still wasn’t sure whether moving through the identical rooms was getting him farther away from their original entry point or getting him nowhere at all. Half of his instincts were telling him to stay put: when you’ve gotten separated from your men, running around without a sense of direction only makes it worse. The other half were screaming at him to tear through every door of the house until he found his partner, because absolutely anything could be happening to Tony, and how dare you sit around here, Rogers – if you don’t move your ass before you’re too late again, you’d never survive it, and who could say you’d even deserve to –

“Right,” he said out loud, turning toward the overhead walkway appraisingly. After a brisk swing of his arms, he took two running steps, leapt, and grabbed the rungs of the second-floor bannister. He flexed once to test whether they would hold his weight, and when they remained steady he curled himself upward, hitching an elbow and then a knee over the edge of the walkway.

He was just pulling himself to his feet when the door that he and Tony had originally walked through (or one of its copies – Steve honestly couldn’t be sure) cracked open, and Steve had his gun in his hand almost before he formed the conscious intention to draw it.

“Careful waving that thing around, soldier,” a voice chastised slyly, and by the time Steve had settled into a defensive stance there was a red-haired woman in a black dressing gown leaning against the second-story doorway, a small smile playing at her lips.

“It’s you,” Steve said. “You’re the woman I saw downstairs.”

“Sorry if I scared you,” she confirmed, detaching herself from the doorframe with a graceful curl of her shoulders. “I sleep walk: the most unbelievable nightmares. Then again,” she stepped closer, looking up at him coyly, “maybe it’s you who should be apologizing. After all, you’re the one who has a gun pointed at me in my own house.”

She raised one eyebrow, and Steve lowered his weapon, keeping his grip loose but ready.

“You live here?” he asked.

“Natasha Romanov,” she introduced herself.

“In that case, Ms. Romanov, I’m going to have to ask you a few questions about the bodies in the floor.”

“Bodies?” she asked, both eyebrows shooting up this time. “What bodies?”

“Those bodies right –” Steve pointed at the place where Tony had uncovered the corpses dressed in their clothing and found himself gesturing toward a completely unremarkable expanse of solid floor. “– there,” he finished faintly.

“You sure you’re feeling all right?” Natasha inquired, looking at him slightly askance. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Steve snapped the gun back up, narrowing his eyes at her.

“You’re doing this,” he accused her. “Are you a –?” He reached out and touched her shoulder experimentally, and she rolled her eyes as his fingers made contact with the fabric of her robe.

“Well I don’t know who taught you your manners, but they need some work,” she responded archly.

“I just want to find my partner and get out of here,” Steve said, still staring dubiously at the apparently solid slope of Natasha’s shoulder.

“Oh yes,” she murmured, “the dreamy fellow with the fussy goatee and the movie-star eyes.”

“You’ve seen him?” Steve demanded.

“I’ve been trying to figure out what you’re doing here with him,” she replied. Seemingly unbothered by the gun Steve had trained on her head, she brushed by him and started to make her way down the ladder – the same ladder, Steve noted with annoyance, that had absolutely not been there minutes earlier.

“I have a working theory,” Natasha continued, glancing up at him as she reached the floor. Steve sighed and holstered his gun so that he could follow her down. “I think you tell yourself that you follow him out of duty or loyalty. But that’s because you’re too afraid to admit your dirty little secret: that the only pleasure you really know how to let yourself feel is self-righteousness.”

Steve’s foot slipped slightly on the final rung of the ladder. He tried to cover the misstep by exaggerating his hop to the ground; but judging by Natasha’s wry expression, he didn’t think he’d succeeded.

“I followed him,” he said, as evenly as he could manage, “because I needed my car keys.”

“You mean these?” She dangled a New York Mets keychain in the air.

“How did you get those?”

She tossed him the keys and then sauntered over to curl up in one of the chairs by the fireplace, pulling her shins toward her chest so she could rest her chin on her knees.

“I think you know how,” she told him, almost gently. “And I think you know from whom.”

Steve felt a shiver run up his spine to the back of his neck – his hair standing on end as it had when the lightning flashed through the lower floor.

“You’re the Black Widow,” he said finally, his voice sounding as if it cost him something to speak the words out loud.

“In the flesh,” she confirmed. “Well – in a manner of speaking, of course. Once a year I get to shuffle back on the mortal coil so I can help a couple of lost souls like yourselves.”

“Lost souls,” Steve repeated skeptically.

“Why else would you be here? You know the stories about this place. Every couple that comes out here ends up shooting each other. Have you started thinking about how you’ll handle it when he tries to draw you into the act?”

“Tony wouldn’t shoot me,” Steve smiled. “And I would never hurt him.”

“So maybe he shoots himself,” Natasha shrugged.

Steve felt something turn over in his stomach, and for a moment he could almost see the lines of the email Tony had written him two months ago, before disappearing without his wallet or cell phone: “Don’t follow me.” A bounty hunter they’d been tracking had tried to abduct Steve the night before, and Steve’s shoulder had gotten hit with a bullet before he made it to safety. The doctors had insisted Steve be admitted over night – even though he tried to tell them he was a fast healer – and so he hadn’t gotten the email in time to stop Tony from going after the bounty hunter alone. When Steve finally caught up to his partner in a field hospital in Alaska, Tony was almost dead from exposure and hypothermia, his whole body racked with shivers as they hurried him into the heating tank.

“Please don’t ever do that again,” Steve had begged when Tony finally opened his eyes again.

Steve shook his head to clear the memory, giving himself a mental kick when he saw how intently Natasha was watching him.

“I wouldn’t let him hurt himself either,” Steve insisted.

Natasha hummed noncommittally.

“You’re terrified of losing him,” she mused. “And you know it’s only a matter of time before that fear makes you do something disastrously stupid. The lovers’ pact frees you from all that.”

“We’re not lovers,” Steve pointed out wryly.

“Is that a hint of wistfulness I hear?” Natasha inquired, her eyes searching his face until they drew a flush to Steve’s cheeks. “Not to worry: you’re both so attractive, and you’ll have all of eternity to work that part out.”

She rose from the chair, padding a few steps forward until she could stand in front of Steve.

“Go ahead: take it,” she said, turning up her palm to hold his gun out to him. Steve swore softly, glancing down at the empty holster at his hip and then snapping his gaze back to the firearm in Natasha’s hand. “Think of it as a guarantee that you’ll never fail someone again.”

Suddenly the gun was falling toward the ground, and Steve reached instinctively to catch it. By the time his hand closed around the cold metal, Natasha was gone.

* * *

“Do you think they’re ready?” Clint asked, leaning against the fireplace a few feet away from the spot where Natasha had reappeared.

“I don’t know,” she admitted, crossing her arms and drumming her fingers thoughtfully against her elbows. “It’s so hard to manage a proper haunting in one night. We used to have years to drive them to the edge.”

“Why’d you have to pick Christmas Eve anyway?” Clint muttered, ambling over so he could wrap his arms around her from behind. “Why couldn’t you have picked a date when everyone is drunk and stupid – like Halloween – man, I loved Halloween.”

“Shocking,” Natasha murmured fondly, running one hand up and down Clint’s arm. “But not everyone is like you _moy dorogoy._ Most people wouldn’t do what you did for me through love alone. They need hopelessness too. And who is filled with despair at the impossibility of human connection and the futility of moral effort on Halloween?”

“That’s fucking dark, Nat,” Clint grinned into her shoulder.

“Spoken like the man who loved and shot me,” she smiled back.

“I just never could resist a nice pair of ankles – or the ability to stage a murder-suicide in under an hour.”

“Well let’s hope we’ve still got the touch,” Natasha said. She inclined her head toward the ornate clock on the mantle, which read 11:30. “Because it’s show time.”

* * *

Tony was almost finished fashioning a battering ram out of a footstool, the fire poker, and three hacked-off chair legs when he became aware that someone was standing behind him. He took his time turning around and kept his face carefully neutral when he saw who it was: a gorgeous redhead, leaning against one edge of the demolished chair, her black dressing gown pulled slightly back to reveal the bullet wound in her stomach.

“Black Widow, I presume,” Tony greeted her. “Or do you prefer the Ghost of Christmas Treason?”

“An apt joke, Stark,” she replied with a smile, “because like the fictional spirits of old, I’m here to give you a warning and to save you from a horrible, lonely death.”

“You can save it for the Senate Subcommittee in the sky, Romanov, because I already did the ‘generic psychobabble’ routine with your accomplice,” Tony retorted. “Now, if you want to tell me where the hell you’re keeping my partner, I’m all ears.”

“But it’s Captain Rogers I came to warn you about,” Natasha responded, resting more of her weight on her forearm, so that she leaned toward him and exposed more of her wound in the same motion. “While you talked to my partner, I talked to yours. And I have to tell you: you may think you know the man you invited into this house, but there’s a darkness in him you’ve only guessed at.”

“Ah, I see,” Tony smiled humorlessly, “you’re trying to tell me that Steve’s going to shoot me. Well you picked a tough sell there, Anya Amasova, because Steve is even less capable of that than he is of picking out clothes that fit him.”

“Tony?”

Relief flooded through him as he recognized Steve’s voice.

“Steve!” he yelled back. “I’m in here!”

“Tony, open the door!” Steve shouted, pounding on the outside of the door next to the fireplace.

“I wouldn’t,” Natasha cautioned. “You haven’t seen what he’s been like in here. I have. That man is not stable.”

“Open the door,” Tony snapped. He drew his gun, more out of frustration than out of any sense that it would be an effective motivator.

“Has he told you about his friend Bucky?” she pressed. “Because he told me. And _o moy_ is that a nasty little drawer of secrets!”

“I don’t believe anything you’re saying,” Tony insisted. “So you can cut the ESP-KGB mind tricks and open the goddamn door!”

“If you insist,” Natasha said sadly, and she let her dressing gown fall over her stomach as she walked over to open the door.

“Steve,” Tony breathed as soon as his partner entered the room. Steve’s face was tight in a way that Tony couldn’t quite sort into his catalogue of Steve expressions, but he was alive and apparently uninjured. Tony felt his thoughts slow to a simmer, like someone had finally turned the burner off under a teakettle.

Which made it all the more surreal when Steve raised his gun, pulled the trigger, and took a chunk of upholstery out of the chair behind Tony’s left hip.

“What are you doing?” Tony demanded, his own gun snapping from Natasha to his partner automatically.

“I’m sorry, Tony,” Steve said, his voice oddly strained, “but there’s no other way out.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Tony shook his head. “You’re here now. We’ll find a way together. We always do.”

“So many times I’ve failed to be fast enough or sharp enough,” Steve continued, as if Tony hadn’t spoken. “But I won’t let that happen with you. I won’t live without you, Tony.” A horrible parody of his usual soft smile stretched across his face, and Tony felt like some kind of alien insect had crawled under his skin. “Don’t be scared. I’m going to go first, so you don’t have to shoot me.”

“Steve,” Tony said evenly, “this isn’t you. You wouldn’t hurt me.”

He held both his hands out to the side to demonstrate. But he had barely gotten his gun pointed toward the ceiling when Steve’s fired, and Tony looked down to see a horrible flowering of red unfolding across his gut.

“Son of a bitch,” he swore, sinking to his knees. His mind buzzed emptily, like a television that had lost its signal and could broadcast nothing but static. Steve advanced a step toward him, and Tony felt himself collapse onto the floor.

“Merry Christmas, Tony,” Steve said sadly.

Then he raised the gun to point it toward his own temple.

“And a happy new year.”

“No!” Tony gasped, trying to lurch toward Steve’s shoe. But Natasha grabbed Steve’s wrist and dragged him backward.

“Let me go!” Steve yelled, jabbing at Natasha’s midsection with his elbow while he wrestled the gun back toward his head.

“Steve,” Tony grit out, fighting against the black tendrils crawling over his vision, “don’t.” For a moment, the room seemed to shiver, and in the last image Tony saw, Steve wavered, his features morphing into those of the ex-sniper who had trapped Tony behind a brick wall.

“Let me go!” Clint yelled, pretending to grapple with Natasha’s arm. “Let me go!”

“He’s out.” Natasha tapped his shoulder a moment later, and the two of them looked down to see Tony’s unconscious form sprawled on the ground – one of his hands still stretched toward Clint’s foot. “Time for round two.”

* * *

“Tony!” Steve yelled.

He could have sworn that he’d heard his partner’s voice a moment earlier, followed by something that sounded horribly like a gunshot. Fighting down the panicked hammering of his heart, Steve trotted in the direction of the sound. He had barely cleared the door to the next room when he stumbled to a stop, feeling like he’d taken a pile driver to the chest. Because Tony was lying slumped on his side, a horrible red stain seeping over his shirt.

“Oh my God,” Steve breathed, rushing forward to turn Tony gently onto his back and press his hand to the wound. “Oh God, Tony. What did you do?”

“I didn’t believe her,” Tony whispered. “I didn’t believe you would do it.”

Steve cupped Tony’s face with his free hand, brushing a trembling thumb over Tony’s cheekbone.

“Or that I would,” Tony finished, his right arm curling up toward Steve.

“What do you mean?” Steve asked, and then he hunched forward in shock as a bullet sliced between his ribs. A burning sensation spread out from his side across his abdomen, and he tried to will away a wave of lightheadedness as he felt his own shirt start to grow wet and heavy.

“Tony,” he managed as the floor tipped ominously toward him, “you have to get out – please. Stay awake.”

But the edges of his vision were closing in like a noose, and Steve was out before he could see Tony fold upward into the form of Natasha. The phantom inspected Steve’s slumped body with a smirk, twirling the gun around her finger.

“Thank you for your cooperation,” she murmured.


	3. Chapter 3

The first thing Steve realized as he lurched back toward consciousness was that Tony was no longer next to him. The second was that he was no longer in the library, and wherever he was, it was dark and cold.

He groped around him with his left hand, trying to keep the right pressed against the wound in his side, and discovered a slick streak of blood and the edge of a step. He must have dragged himself back to the staircase somehow before losing consciousness. And the trail seemed to continue down the steps ahead of him, which meant that maybe, through some miracle, Tony had found his way out as well.

Clenching his jaw against the scalding pressure in his torso, Steve hauled himself over the edge and started down the stairs. It was agonizingly slow going – the wet surface beneath him a reminder that he was losing blood with every heave forward – and so when a record-player somewhere in the sitting room crackled to life and started playing “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” Steve swore violently.

“You’ve got to be _fucking_ kidding me,” he groaned, tumbling down the last set of stairs and into the entryway, where he could finally see Tony crawling toward the door. Tony heaved himself onto his back when he heard Steve’s voice, pulling out his gun and aiming it shakily at Steve’s head. Steve drew his own with a painful effort, and for a moment they lay there in a standoff, staring each other down while Bing Crosby crooned in the background. Finally, Tony dropped his weapon to his side and let his head fall back on the floor.

“Are you scared, Steve?” Tony called over to him. “Because I am.”

“Yeah, me too,” Steve admitted. He released his own grip on his gun and rolled over with a grunt.

“I can’t believe I’m going to die in a place that just got cut from the ‘25 Most Haunted Houses in America’ list. Christ, that’s embarrassing.”

“Maybe you should have thought of that earlier,” Steve grumbled.

“ _You_ should have thought of that,” Tony snapped back.

“You shot me!” Steve protested.

“For fuck’s sake, Steve: you’re the one who shot me.”

“Tony, I could never –”

Steve froze. He _could_ never, he realized: just like floorboards couldn’t regenerate, and a ladder couldn’t disappear and reappear, and a house couldn’t be built like an M.C. Escher drawing. And indeed, the longer he concentrated on the complete impossibility of his ever shooting Tony in the stomach, the more the pain in his own abdomen subsided. He probed his side with his right hand and found nothing but smooth skin under the wet slick of his shirt. Emboldened by that experiment, he sat up. If anything the pain felt more distant than when he had been lying down.

“Tony,” he called, scrambling to his feet and hurrying over to take his partner’s hand, “get up.”

“I can’t get up, you asshole,” Tony groaned. “I’ve been shot.”

“No you haven’t!” Steve replied, his voice almost gleeful with relief. “See?” He wrapped his other hand behind Tony’s shoulders and pulled him up gently, moving slowly enough that Tony could feel the pain lessen as they went.

“Well fuck me,” Tony breathed, and Steve felt another thrill of giddiness when Tony continued to grip his arms, though he looked steady enough on his feet by now.

They shared a long look – searching each other’s expressions for confirmation of something neither of them could have named out loud – and then bolted for the door. Once they made it to the porch, they paused momentarily to notice that the dark stains had disappeared from their clothing. Tony reached out, as if to touch the undamaged fabric of Steve’s shirt, before pulling back. And then Steve placed a hand on Tony’s lower back, and they sprinted to their cars.

* * *

As the clock on the mantle ticked closer to midnight, Clint Barton and Natasha Romanov sat back in their chairs by the fireplace, enjoying the last sensations of warmth before the new day came. The lamps in the library had been dimming one by one as the hour approached, but the faint sounds of the record player could still be heard from the floor below.

“We almost had ‘em this year,” Clint said wistfully, stretching out his legs to get his feet closer to the fire. “I thought for sure those two saps were the perfect targets.”

“So lost and so clueless.” Natasha shook her head. “Maybe they’ll get there eventually. But people these days have lost the spirit somehow. They’re so afraid to take the leap – to make a real commitment.”

“Not us though,” Clint grinned, wrapping Natasha’s hand in his.

“Not us,” she agreed. And when the clock struck twelve, she leaned forward to brush her lover’s lips with the ghost of a kiss.

* * *

“Spirit!” the terrified voice on Tony’s television called, “hear me! I am not the man I was. I will not be the man I must have been but for this intercourse. Why show me this, if I am past all hope!”

Tony stared blankly at the black-and-white image on the screen, his head slumped over on the armrest of the couch and one hand still closed loosely around a now-forgotten file folder. He used the other hand to grope across the table in search of his coffee, only to find that the mug was slightly out of reach. Giving up the remaining five inches as a lost cause, Tony was just contemplating making a third attempt to go to bed when he heard a knock at his door.

He couldn’t imagine who would be outside his apartment at 4:00 AM on Christmas morning, but he shoved his feet into his slippers and padded over to open the door. The sight that greeted him – a somewhat bleary-looking Steve Rogers, his hair mussed on one side – caused a momentary flutter in Tony’s chest.

“I thought you had sweet potatoes to roast,” Tony said.

“I couldn’t sleep,” Steve explained, one hand rubbing at the back of his neck. “Can I –”

“Please,” Tony replied, so quickly that he winced internally. He stepped back to let Steve through the door. “Is everything all right? You’re not hurt?”

“No, I’m fine,” Steve assured him. He had walked several paces from the entryway into the living room, but now he turned back to face Tony. “At least…it seems like I’m fine. I guess everything that happened in there was just in our heads?”

“I guess,” Tony echoed. He felt about as unsatisfied by that account as Steve looked. But revisiting any of the other possible explanations still running through background analysis in his mind would require returning to the vision of Steve standing over him, a gun pointed toward his own head. Maybe the real Steve in his living room sensed some of what was in Tony’s thoughts, because he cleared his throat and set his jaw in determination.

“I don’t know what you heard or saw in there,” Steve said, “but I wanted to tell you that the reason I care about the X-Files – it's not because I need to feel like I’m in the right – or, that’s not the only reason anyway. That’s not why I wanted to be out there with you.”

“You wanted to be there,” Tony repeated.

“Yes,” Steve said firmly.

“Even though you had to crawl down a flight of stairs through a trail of what you thought was my blood?”

“I could have lived without that part,” Steve allowed.

“Even though I stole your keys?” Tony grimaced. 

“I'm glad you stole my keys,” Steve replied with a soft smile. He took a step forward and then paused, staring up at the archway he’d been about to pass through. “You have mistletoe,” he remarked in surprise. “I wouldn’t have thought you’d be the type to decorate.”

“Ahhh yes,” Tony acknowledged, his mind stalling out briefly at the image of the small green branch hanging almost over Steve’s head. “That was a gag gift from Rhodey. He was in town last week. Apparently he thinks I need to get laid to take the edge off – said I need all the help I can get.”

“Do you?” Steve asked, the pale skin on his cheeks flushing furiously. “Need help I mean?” 

And whether it was because his brain hadn't quite kicked back into gear or because he'd watched a fatal bullet wound disappear from his stomach hours earlier, Tony did something that had never felt possible before. He stepped forward to close the distance between them, pulling Steve forward by the front of his shirt until they both stood under the arch.

“Need your help?” he responded. “Always.”

He rolled up onto the tips of his toes to kiss Steve gently, feeling Steve’s hands brush faintly up his arms. When they pulled apart, Steve let his hands fall back to his sides, and Tony took a step back.

“I know we said we weren’t going to get each other anything for Christmas,” Tony said eventually, when the searching look in Steve’s eyes became too much to bear, “but I do have this little thing.” He turned to the entryway table and pulled a raucously colored gift bag out of a lower cabinet.

“Tony,” Steve smiled, putting a new note into the syllables that Tony didn’t think he’d heard before. “I got you something too.” He reached into the inner pocket of his coat and took out a small wrapped package.

The two of them exchanged gifts and took up their usual positions on the living room couch, Steve chuckling when Tony instantly started shaking the wrapped box for clues. Steve pulled the blanket from the couch over Tony’s shoulders absent-mindedly as Tony affixed the bow from his present to Steve’s chest. Neither of them paid any attention to the television – where Scrooge was asking a passing child what day it was – or to the windows, where the snowy remains of the earlier storm were pressing lightly against the panes.

Many miles away, and well beyond the range of either Steve or Tony’s thoughts by now, the last light in the Red Manor winked out, as if the house were settling in for another year’s sleep.


End file.
